He was born in 1947 in Pinner, a working-class town just outside London. His birth name had nothing flashy about it at all — it would be years before he’d choose the stage name the world now knows him by.

His childhood home was far from harmonious. His father was a strict, emotionally distant Royal Air Force officer who disapproved of music as a serious pursuit. His parents’ marriage was tense, and they would eventually divorce when he was a teenager. Music became his refuge from the arguments and silence at home.

He discovered he had an extraordinary gift almost by accident. At just three years old, he sat down at his grandmother’s piano and started picking out tunes he had heard on the radio — by ear, with no lessons at all. His family was stunned. It was clear immediately that this wasn’t ordinary childhood curiosity; it was a rare and specific talent.

By age eleven, that talent had earned him a scholarship to one of the most prestigious music institutions in the country, where he studied classical piano on Saturdays for years. But behind the disciplined lessons, something else was stirring in him — he was falling in love with a completely different kind of music.

It happened when he first heard Elvis Presley and Little Richard on record. Something clicked. The rigid classical training suddenly felt like a cage. He wanted to bang the keys, not just tickle them. He wanted the wildness, the freedom, the sheer physicality of rock and roll.

As a teenager, he started playing piano in pubs and working men’s clubs for a bit of pocket money, backing up local singers who barely acknowledged the introverted boy behind them. Around this time, he also joined a band that would eventually take him on the road backing touring American soul and blues acts — a gritty, unglamorous education in what it actually took to be a performer.

It was during this period that he made the decision that would change everything: he legally changed his name, borrowing pieces of it from two fellow musicians he admired, and stepped fully into the identity the world would come to celebrate.

The rest, as they say, is music history.

Have you guessed who it is?

It’s Elton John — born Reginald Kenneth Dwight, the self-taught piano prodigy from Pinner who turned childhood loneliness into one of the most extraordinary careers in the history of popular music.